In a 5-4 ruling, we have to stop being friends

June 28, 2012

So everyone’s Facebooks and Twitters and whatever else people look at all day at work when they should be working is blowing up about the Supreme Court upholding the whole health care business. Your more liberal friends are all happy (though your extra-strength liberal friends are probably still pissed we don’t have single-payer health care like in communist Israel) and your conservative-leaning friends are all pissy and/or overly histrionic about how the Constitution was ganged raped on a pinball machine (which would be impressive because where the shit can you find a pinball machine these days). Just do yourself a favor and don’t check those things for like a week. Spend that time reading our Renal Failure archives. You’ll thank us for the headaches you’ll avoid.

Anyway, as for assholes like myself, this decision on health care reform is the culmination of a journey into the depths of mental illness.

“So this individual mandate thing was originally the brain child of the conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation,” I say.

“Yeah, and it’s what Republicans were pushing in the 90’s during the health care debate with then-President Clinton,” Tina the Lesbian said. “And then Mitt Romney instituted it in Massachusetts when he was governor there.”

“So then President Obama comes along, wants to reform health care, picks up the individual mandate idea, dusts it off, and says hey let’s do this,” I say. “He couldn’t do single-payer but he’s thinking it’s better than nothing.”

“Right, and that’s when all the Republicans and talking-heads started screaming about how this individual mandate was now the worst thing ever,” says Tina the Lesbian.

“So they hate Obama, Obama uses one of their ideas, now that idea is horrible and worse than Hitler,” I say. “And even the guy whose crowning achievement as governor was that idea now tells everyone that he hates it and wants to kill it so bad that it’s now a platform of his presidential campaign.”

“Yeah, this whole debate over the individual mandate can be summed as ‘It was great until you started liking it so now it sucks,'” says Tina the Lesbian.

“Is there a name for such a mental dysfunction?” I say. “Because I’ve never hated someone to the point where I had to vehemently denounce the things I like just because my nemesis enjoyed them too. HE LIKES VIDEO GAMES? NOW I HATE VIDEO GAMES AND I MUST BURN NINTENDO TO THE GROUND!”

“The closest I can come to describing that is ‘unhinged contrarian feud rage,'” says Tina the Lesbian. “It’s like the Abuse and Argument rooms from that Monty Python sketch combined into one room where the person across from you automatically and without fail takes the contrary opinion to you and also does it with the abusive anger reserved for those you hold a blood grudge against.”

“The Hatfields and McCoys may have hated each other’s guts, but the Hatfields didn’t stop drinking bathtub moonshine just because the McCoy’s drank it,” I say. “I know how to hold a grudge, I know what it is to hate someone, and it never occurred to me that if my nemesis liked something I liked I had to not only stop liking it but also had to vehemently oppose it and pretend I never liked it to begin with.”

“Maybe it’s like when people liked Vanilla Ice in the early 90’s but by the time 1994 rolled around no one liked him anymore or would even admit to ever liking him in the first place,” says Tina the Lesbian. “Or like in 2008 when I almost didn’t vote for Obama because Colin Powell had endorsed him and we wouldn’t trust Colin Powell to open a tupperwear container that had already been opened because of his role in getting the Iraq War started.”

“That’s right, we hate Colin Powell that much,” I say. “We almost started liking torture as policy because Colin Powell came out against torture.”

“Yeah, this sort of reflexive hate is more common on an individual basis,” says Tina the Lesbian. “But when a large percentage of the population partakes in it, it’s pretty fucking scary.”

As of now I’m chalking up ‘unhinged contrarian feud rage’ as a new flavor of spite, where you not only cut off your nose to spite your face, you then claim to never have had a face to begin with and face-having is a sign of being a socialist raper of freedom. It’s like the Dr. Pepper of spite, in that I can’t figure it the fuck out. I think I taste revenge, but the other 26 flavors are messing with it.

Fuck it.. beer and video games for the next week it is. Find your own escape plan because shit’s going to be dumber than usual out there in the world. Remain calm and stay in your bunker until ridiculousness levels come down to a more manageable level.

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“As of now I’m chalking up ‘unhinged contrarian feud rage’ as a new flavor of spite, where you not only cut off your nose to spite your face, you then claim to never have had a face to begin with and face-having is a sign of being a socialist raper of freedom. It’s like the Dr. Pepper of spite, in that I can’t figure it the fuck out. I think I taste revenge, but the other 26 flavors are messing with it.”

tunin’ out the eff-books for a bit. everybody is a constitutional law scholar today. and for what it’s worth, i’d buy a can of ‘Unhinged Contrarian Feud Rage’ from the energy drink shelf at the Quik-E-Mart. Mix that up with some Loopy Vodka, and i could get my drink on…